Thread by @inflammateomnia

People are curious about what you learn interviewing 20+ nyc women about dating apps, so here we go
Buckle your seatbelts, pour a cuppa, and put your men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-the-seventh-circle culture war gladii and scuta aside
Let's take the numbers first:

https://twitter.com/inflammateomnia/status/1723448583129584058

27: women interviewed
25: avg age
11: interviews that were themselves first dates (the girls knew what they were getting into, it was actually a great opener)
8: avg hrs app usage
1: times I spit out my fake tooth in front of an interviewee
0: avg # of dates a woman had per week

Qualitatively:
I found deep yearning for a parental model of a trad relationship coupled with a stubborn refusal to submit to that sort of role, at least for the caliber of men they found
They wanted to date their dad, or someone's dad, and they were getting dick pics instead

I found a huge frustration with the engagement-uber-alles model of app design, a high-volume low-quality pipeline of superficial prospects, undermined by an unspoken addiction to that dopamine hit of being seen as desirable again and again and again and

I found young people trying to reinvent the rules of the game from utopian first principles such that they were allowed to screw around, conflicting with their socially conditioned models of sluts and chads etc
(I was one of these young people, but my hobby is being an old man)

Women's expressed preference was to meet a guy they could reciprocally devote themselves to
Their revealed preference was playing Farmville with a rotating crop of random dudes they'd never meet
Which was their own fault, but apps + culture made it difficult to do otherwise

Anecdotally:
One woman was afraid to ride the subway and ubered to every date (thx saudi arabia)
She had one serious college boyfriend before moving to NYC
She hated guys' forwardness
After a few drinks she told me she'd grown to like the degradation of being a disposable hookup

One woman was 33, extremely rad hipster, had been in a few relationships, and acknowledged that she'd been both selecting guys who "weren't ready" and also failing to communicate her actual desire of getting serious for fear of seeing herself as square, boring, not independent

One woman was 22, had just put a toe into the dating app world, and immediately retracted it because it was like exposing her stuffed-animal disney-princess romantic child self to a scalding molten crucible of callous demands and mediocre phalluses (phalli?)

UX-wise:
Nearly all of the women were lazy
In contrast to guys' meticulous Sankey charts graphing out their nine thousand swipes, these women really did expect to be matched with a guy who'd make it make sense
Rather than making it make sense with the guy they were matched with

(To serve this need, I ended up building an app with the help of another phenomenal freelancer that inferred your fitness interests from your location history and made matches like "you guys both went to Soulcycle this month, maybe you can go together")

App design made it unnatural to form real connection. The best apps were for the gays - the single best app was a gay cruising app called "Squirt" that had features like fiction written by users, news articles where they discussed issues in comments
You know - actual community.

Sociologically:
It was hard for these women to work against the headwinds of app design and dating culture
These headwinds existed because they were operating in a vacuum, in the absence of community

Absent community, the only factors shaping the dynamic were market forces and libido. No human connection but what you brought.
And bringing human decency to these apps where you'd be rejected or propositioned ten times a day was like plugging your vagus nerve into a car battery

Some apps like Hinge tried to do friends-of-friends dynamics to counteract the toxic community vacuum effect. Didn't work.
The apps that worked better brought their own community with them: J date, Christian Mingle, Farmers Connect. Tougher to dehumanize someone on common ground

When you want to make a movie that appeals to everyone, you hit the common denominators: sex, action, humor, romance
Similarly when you try to make a social app for everyone, they're forced to engage along common denominators

People's expressed preference was for ~2012 okcupid. But writing reading sifting is a lot of work! In a natural community, the expression and the sifting is done for you, just by participating in the community
So their revealed preference was Tiktok shopping for other humans

It made sense that straight apps couldn't do what gay apps did in allowing free and open communication to exist, creating a community
Cause gay guys cruising are uniformly horny, whereas every woman online knows the result of broadcasting your availability

(Today people aren't joking and aren't wrong when they say Twitter is a dating app. The truth is that every community is a dating app. It's what communities are, or at least how they generally perpetuate themselves)

Personally:
I thought myself very wise and very jaded after listening to all these women.
I saw them using guys for emotional validation, just like the redpillers said was women's wont. They were self-deprecatingly cynical about it, about getting free drinks and dinners

I saw them suffering, wanting treatment they knew they deserved, becoming more cynical each time they didn't get it, exposing the next guy to more hoops and disqualifying and dehumanization
(The guys, of course, were already objectifying)
I saw a feedback loop underway

I both wanted no part of it and wanted to fix it
I built the app, then another app called "intent" that was basically concentric Twitter circles, posting to smaller or larger subsets of your social graph
(Local hammer-owner sees problem, looks like nail!)
github.com/j4p3/tent-app

I wrote an essay about digital sincerity and the rise of finsta and the problem of exposing your many contextual selves to The Arena, a problem with the death of community that was upstream of the dating app charnel house
bonner.jp/posts/digital-…

I learned that it's not possible to build a dating app that works for a culture that doesn't. People persevere - millions are finding each other On The Apps in spite of it all - but millions more are not
Ask our boy Robin Hanson how the birthrate is going

I'm not gonna get into the bigger Society stuff about young people needing stability to be able to safely make long term relationship commitments and not finding any
About women's expectations for a potential partner's earnings, height, in a world where young women outperform

That's all been done to death anyway. These trends' effect on dating apps is just to make them even more toxic, to drive people into progressively smaller enclaves that are sheltered against the bitter vacuum of a communityless society

And this is probably a good thing!
You want to meet somebody? Find your microsolidarity at the local running club or skee ball league or canvassing group or Part of Twitter. They're the only contexts where the guiderails to be human to each other come built-in

I've bloviated enough. /EOT
If you made it this far and have questions hit me up, I've got stories and stories and

.. though on the other hand, we've got it ez compared to our boy flaco

https://x.com/inflammateomnia/status/1723237847308677461